Collections and Connections

The following writing and reading exercises touch upon the skills of plotting, patterning and shaping a text. Some of these refer to extracts from Arthur Conan Doyle's 'Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes', published in the Strand magazine 1901-1905.

1. List three or four objects from an existing, familiar text. These should give the ‘clues’ to a well-known character, place, story, play, film, rhyme or poem. Share them, either all together or one at a time, with another person. Can they ‘deduce/infer’ the original from your out-takes?

Eg Indian pennies, chewing gum, a spelling medal, a broken watch.

(These are all gifts which Arthur (Boo) Radley places in the knothole of a tree, and which Scout Finch finds. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee)

2. List three or four objects which do not yet have a story. Challenge yourself, or another writer, to make connections, put them in order, or include in a story. (In practice, with NWP Whodunit 24.1.2015 and NWP Bucks 29.1.2015, a collection helped to concentrate writers' minds and provoked thoughts and feelings of people and places, actions and memories. It seemed that sometimes writers used such a collection as a springboard into writing; at other times writers 'held' them in mind like some sort of destination towards which their writing was tending, even though it might never get there.)

3. Cluedo and consequences : Each person invents one each of the following; character, place, weapon, motive, consequence ... these are written on strips of paper and then put into separate envelopes and shuffled. Each writer then chooses one strip from each envelope and tries to include each in a piece of their own writing. Share and discuss.

4. Read and discuss the attached extracts from The Complete Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. Arthur Conan Doyle 1905 ('Sherlock extracts' button below). Then write a serious or comic ‘deduction’ dialogue (e.g. between Watson and Holmes) in the style of Conan Doyle. This might tend to parody!

5. Reverse consequences: Start at the end and work backwards through successive causes. ‘There was an old lady who swallowed a fly ...’ (<'because' rather than 'and then'>...) Writers sit in a circle. Each writer invents an 'ending' eg the woman died. This should be written at the bottom of a piece of paper. Each piece of paper is then passed to the person on the left. Now each writer must write the immediate cause to the 'ending' and fold the paper over so that the ending is hidden when they pass the paper on to the left again. Repeat a few times. Unfold paper and read.

6. Use the 'word stems' as follows and 'free-write' for 3 or 4 minutes: 'At first I thought ... but later I realised ...'

7. Invent characters and fitting or ironic consequences ... a cook was killed with a bread-knife; a teacher ....